OMG!!! MySpace goes titsup

The United States' most popular website has been taken offline by a power outage.

A message from MySpace founder and president Tom Anderson said he expected the site to be back by early Sunday evening, Pacific Time. Eight hours later, the site was still out of action.

Teenagers and lurking paedophiles were offered the chance to play a Flash version of the arcade classic PacMan, instead.

Cute.

"There's been a power outage in our data center. we're in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. hopefully we'll be back online within the hour. it's 6:40pm PST now. wanna place a bet?" wrote founder and president Tom Anderson, whose CapsLock key also appears to be on the blink.

MySpace has suffered intermittent down time over the past fortnight. Last October, a few lines of invalid JavaScript on a user's web page brought the site to its knees. The author, who was learning AJAX programming for the first time, put the blame on web browsers executing invalid code.

But cute messages and chronic unreliability are a feature of the current wave of 'Web 2.0' websites and services. TypePad suffered another serious outage 10 days ago; Flickr is notorious for its unreliability, and a Flickr-clone called Zooomr "launched" recently, only to disappear again for several days. ®